DearAnne, Thread!! What kind of staff? Sometimes a staff is merely a staff.
Harry is right. This format is insidious and possibly on speed. tpr
Anne Prescott wrote:
> Wow--what a thread. And, yes, I'm printing out Harry Berger and a number
> of others too for my "Book II" file. Two thoughts. Should extra-wonderful
> threads like this be somehow wound into Terry Krier's Spenser Journal (do
> I have the new title right?)? Second: my one little contribution to the
> Palmer matter concerns a text that I wish Spenser scholars would pay more
> attention to. I did an essay on it that I do recommend for its pictures
> even if not for the text (it was in SP and a condensed version is in
> Mihoko Suzuki's collection of Spenser criticism). I don't mean to urge
> those on the list to run out and read Prescott, though, only to run out
> and read Stephen Bateman's *Travayed Pilgrime* (1569, as I recall). As a
> poem this pilgrimage allegory is negligible and in particularly repellent
> blackletter, but its conception is interesting. And the pictures! In the
> original French version and the later Spanish version the knight, mounted
> on his horse Desire, is guided by a palmer named Reason. Naturally, the
> Palmer carries a staff (the knight wears allegorical armor and travels
> through a "Field Called Time." His lady companion is Memory. In Bateman's
> Protestantized version the guide, Reason, isn't exactly a palmer because
> this text is much more anti-Catholic than Spenser's FQ, but he *looks*
> like a Palmer because of his staff. I can't prove that Spenser read this
> text, although I'm morally certain that he did, and in any case I'm not
> sure that identifying it as a "source" gets us anywhere (seeing how a more
> militant Protestant works the material is more interesting). But my bet is
> that he loved the pictures (dig the one of "the palace of disordered
> livers" that comes very, very close to having verbal overlaps with the
> house of Lucifera) and that the one of the knight with an oversexed horse
> plus a lady guide and a palmer-like guide named Reason and allegorical
> armor and a field called time etc. etc. stuck in his mind and further
> energized his imagination when he was thinking about both Redcrosse and
> Guyon. I could be wrong, this has perhaps nothing to do with what
> Spenser's palmer *means* or *does* in the poem, but the picture of the
> palmer-who-isn't-quite-a-palmer-anymore remains intriguing. Now I'll have
> to check the illustrations to see if he could be in drag. Honestly, Tom!
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